*supercollider

You don’t see nearly as many brands on Flickr as you do on YouTube or Facebook.

But they do exist, and after a few conversations recently about what the opportunities for brands were on Flickr I thought I’d have a look. Having trawled through pages of Google and Flickr searches, I’ve grouped the results into three categories:

• Brand communities and extensions
• Branded resources
• Branded contests

And at the end of the review of what’s out there already, I’ve distilled a few learnings, a few things to watch out for, and a conclusion around the opportunities for brands on Flickr.

Branded resources on Flickr

Nikon Digital Learning Center

An extension of the Nikon School and Nikon Digital Learning Center website, Nikon’s Digital Learning Center on Flickr was launched in August 2007 as an “online resource (that) provides Flickr members with tutorials, practical photography tips and advice from Nikon photo professionals to assist them in taking the photos they’ve always dreamed of capturing.

Nikon’s Digital Learning Center shows where the opportunity space for branded resources is. Although they provided professionally authored tutorials, they’ve also brought a number of their sponsored pros to the group, where they post photos, answer questions from the community, and share their experience.

As of now, the group has 8,527 members, 23,440 photos, and 669 discussions.

Brand communities and extensions on Flickr

MAKE Magazine

The O’Reilly magazine that is both bible and manifesto for the resurgent hardware hacking scene has smartly used Flickr to create a space for its inventive readership to share and discuss their creations.

It’s a match made in heaven, as even Caterina Fake, one of Flickr’s now-departed founders, called it “the best magazine ever“.

Results: 3,970 members, 23,476 photos, and 114 discussions over the last three and a half years.

CRAFT Magazine

CRAFT, O’Reilly’s sister magazine to MAKE, has done even better than its sibling with its rampant CRAFT Flickr group.

Results: 4,503 members, 57,654 photos, and 203 discussion groups over two years.

Innocent

As a brand universally admired by marketers in the UK for “getting it”, it’s not surprising to see Innocent doing cool things on Flickr.

The beauty of their approach is that it feels in line with the brand’s values. It’s not big bang marketing stuff. It’s also not a one-off UGC program destined to be abandoned after the campaign of the moment is over.

Rather, Innocent is using Flickr as a place to:

• Put up photos here and there of the events it runs, including their unique AGM and the Innocent Village Fete
• Provide exposure to the Big Knit charity promotion and a way for people to share their creations
• Run quirky contests (etc etc etc)

The result is a natural extension of Innocent’s brand, at least as I perceive it: playful, good, natural.

BBC

The BBC made integration with social media properties a key pillar of their BBC 2.0 strategy, establishing spaces on Flickr for fans to upload photos which would be integrated back into BBC websites and multimedia properties.

A few examples of BBC photosets on Flickr include:
The One Show (820 members, 2,709 photos)
Eurovision 2008 (78 members, 922 photos)
Elecric Proms 2007 (23 members, 125 photos)
At the Fringe 2007 (31 members, 559 photos)
Rugby World Cup (94 members, 529 photos)
Football World Cup (154 members, 844 photos)

Urban Outfitters

The above image comes from a blog post on the This Week in Etail blog, which rightly notes that at one time the Urban Outfitters’ Flickr group was promoted from their homepage and their blog.

The tout is long gone, but the the group is still a growing collection of pics from both wardrobe remixers wearing UO clothes and photoshoots from Urban Outfitters themselves, and is currently over 2,000 photos strong. The European contingent of UO have a stream of their own, and an interesting attempt at a branded pool dedicated to Summer Music rounds off the series.

Results

• Urban Outfitters: 648 members, 2,087 photos
• Urban Outfitters Summer Music: 47 members, 403 photos

GM

GM recently celebrated their second anniversary on Flickr, having established a profile as part of their GM Blogs initiative in 2006.

Their photostream has been updated regularly since, with 1,377 photos posted to date. It’s a wide range of imagery, ranging from vehicle launches to user generated content and everything in between.

It’d be interesting to hear from GM how much traffic their images receive, but they definitely deserve credit for sticking with the initiative and not letting it become another branded social media graveyard.

7-11 x Kwik-E-Mart

As part of the extensive promotional campaign around Simpsons: The Movie, 7-11 stores around North America were turned into Kwik-E-Marts. It was a brilliant and fun idea, but more than the value of the local traffic was the global exposure to the execution. Flickr provided a home for the Kwik-E-Mart photos, and blogs and media around the world funneled in traffic to the photoset.

Results: 833,972 views of 60 photos, 33 comments since July 2007.

Bank of America: America’s Cheer

For their America’s Cheer campaign, Bank of America have hit all the obvious social media spaces: Facebook, Youtube, and Flickr.

The campaign microsite pulls in group photos from Flickr, but it’s the contribution part which is interesting. Using their status as a sponsored Flickr partner, they’ve built a branded tool called America’s Cheer Photo Share which allows people to very easily add photos to the BoA group directly via their Flickr account.

Results: since launch three months ago, an underwhelming 159 members and 77 photos. And two user posts in the discussion area, including one that in true Flickr style simply says “This group is stupid. Yay America.”

Smithsonian

As they say on their profile page, photography predates the Smithsonian by only a few years. The world’s largest museum and research complex has over 13 million photos in their collection, of which only a small fraction have been digitized.

However the Smithsonian’s first batch of photos on Flickr represents a glimpse into the potential wealth in the archives, all of which are supplied with the “no known copyright restrictions” designation.

Bon Jovi

The hair metal band have shown remarkable staying power over the years, and have transitioned into the digital era with their own social media strategy.

In addition to a competition centered on YouTube, the band have asked their fans to upload photos to the Bonjovilovesmytown group on Flickr. From their, photos might make their way into the band’s concert videos, or onto a mosaic poster, which they envision will look like this:

Results: 448 members, 1,559 photos, 13 group posts

Purina’s Do More for Pets

Purina is another brand leveraging Flickr for user contributed photography as part of a wider campaign strategy. In this case, selected photos submitted to their Do More for Pets gallery are featured within their Do More For Pets microsite on Yahoo!, which looks suspiciously like one of those Yahoo! “branded universes” that were supposedly ditched when Terry Semel exited.

There’s no apparent incentive to submit, but as anyone that uses Flickr knows, the only as popular as photos of babies, flowers and kittens are pictures of puppies. There’s no shortage of source material.

Results: 580 members, 1,858 photos, 10 discussions over 13 months

Branded contests on Flickr

CRAFT & MAKE magazines Halloween competition

Siblings magazines MAKE and CRAFT got in the Flickr competition business early, starting with Halloween crafts contest from October 2006.

Simply take a photo of your scary crafts creation, upload it to either the CRAFT or MAKE Flickr groups and tag with “MAKECRAFTHALLOWEEN“. Selections would be highlighted on the publication blogs or featured in the magazine.

GM FYI

Who would’ve thought old-school auto giant GM would’ve been first to the punch, but they were in there even earlier, featuring one Flickr photo tagged GMFYI on their GM FYI Blog every day since May 2006.

Results: 4,530 photos of GM vehicles old and new

Nikon Stunning Gallery

Nikon grasped the power of the Flickr community early, and launched a simple but highly effective campaign that put the prosumer photographer at the heart of “Stunning Nikon”.

The proposition was simple: if you shoot Nikon, tag your images “nikonstunninggallery” and the best would be featured on the Nikon Stunning Gallery microsite. Nikon also cross-promoted Flickr to its own customer base.

The competition was dead easy to enter, backed by an integrated campaign including the first ever Flickr brand advertising and a UGC component involving some of the community’s stars, and the reward was the simple currency that all Flickrites craved: exposure of their photos.

Rohit Bhargava presciently predicted that the promotion could result in over 100,000 images. The campaign launched in 2006 so it’s taken a while, but the count is now over 120,000 images.

Results: 123,208 tagged images

New Yorker Eustace Tilley contest

The venerable New Yorker celebrated their 83rd anniversary by holding a competition for artists, illustrators and readers to create their own version of Eustace Tilley. The competition was run through a Flickr group, with winners featured on newyorker.com and the anniversary issue of the magazine itself.

Results: 305 members, 173 quality entries

LG Viewty

Driven through a sponsored group, LG’s Viewtyful World Photo Contest on Flickr came with a prize most photographers would salivate over: the chance to be published in National Geographic magazine.

LG also kept the barrier of entry low: simply submit the most interesting and striking image in your photo library.

Photos were judged by a National Geographic photographer against three categories “Night View”, “Retouch”, and “Moments”. Weekly winners based on the number of votes made at the LG Viewtyful website received free handsets, and the final winner also received $10,000 in cash.

Results: 6,728 group members, 19,518 photos.

SCIFI.COM, MAKE magazine + DVICE: Make a Cylon contest

To kick off the return of Battlestar Galactica to the airwaves in spring 2008, SCIFI.COM, MAKE magazine and DVICE partnered up on a contest targeted at the hardest of the hardcore geeks amongst the crowd.

The brief: make a Cylon, using physical materials.

The mechanism: add your photos or videos to Flickr or Youtube with the tag “dvicemakecylon”

The payoff: entries judged by two of the hot female cylon stars of the show, winners shown on the SCI FI Channel for the adulation of your peers in geekhood, and a variety of BSG swag.

Results: only 85 photos and probably a third of those original entries, but the barrier of entry was very high. And the results are pretty inventive:

Firefox 3 T-Shirt Design Contest

As part of the huge buzz campaign orchestrated for the launch of Firefox 3, the Firefox marketing team ran a t-shirt design contest on Flickr. Showing what’s possible when you have a huge and rabid fan base at your disposal, in a matter of weeks the competition racked up thousands of entries to choose from.

A good creative outlet for the designers amongst the Firefox loyal, and another effective and ultra-low-cost marketing exercise to add to the Firefox collection.

Results: 3,535 members, 1,832 images, 173 discussions

Others

I kept finding more and more competitions, so I’m going to simply list the rest here:

• Film 4 Summer Screen competition
• MOO sticker design competition
• U.S. government department EPA’s Earth Day photo contest
• PBS Nature’s photo competitions, including the Alps and Parrots
• Brooks Track Jacket photo competitions
• Opera browser photo competition
• PSFK Cool Hunt competition

The opportunities for brands

Looking at the activities brands have engaged in on Flickr over the last few years, it seems there are at least four areas of opportunities:

1. Spreading remarkable content
   If you’ve got unique visual content that would be truly interesting to people (and not just your brand), why not share it? 7-11’s Kwik-E-Mart photos hosted on Flickr received over 800,000 views after being distributed around the web, and GM uses their photostream as a way of showing off their product, past, present and future.
2. Crowdsourcing content and hosting competitions
   Want to run an image-based UGC competition without the hassle of creating your own infrastructure? Host it on Flickr as LG, Firefox, NYT, CRAFT and many others have done.
   
3. Creating a community area and creative outlet for fans of your product
   If you’ve got a passionate group of creative fans, Flickr can make an ideal place for them to gather and share their creativity. See MAKE, CRAFT, Urban Outfitters and GM for good examples of this.
4. Providing support or resources for your customers
   Nikon’s Digital Learning Center is the benchmark on Flickr so far.

The most under-explored of the opportunity spaces is Branded Resources, by a mile. I suspect this is because the Flickr community is strongly self-supporting, and the need for branded resources might be seen as less. But this seems like a missed opportunity. Why couldn’t Red Bull run an extreme photography resources group, or Expedia a travel photography one?

Things to be wary of

As with any social space, Flickr users are extremely protective over their community and suspicious of any brands trying to participate.

There is a lot of opportunity to engage with such a passionate, creative and social group of the web and create something new and meangingful as a result. But make a wrong step and you will hear about it, loud and clear.

Here are a few things to be aware of for brands looking at Flickr:

1. Flickr must approve commerical use
   Commercial use is theoretically banned on Flickr without explicit permission from Yahoo! and will be removed upon discovery, but it’s not that cut and dry in practice as many of the examples above illustrate. In this regard I think Flickr is similar to MySpace.

   Paid for deals with MySpace get you a promotional package, a custom template design with much more flexibility, and potentially unique and custom functionality which can enhance your campaign. But there are lots of branded MySpace pages out there which have not been paid for — usually you can tell as they still have the top banner serving ads on the page, which paid for pages do not. You run the risk of MySpace taking down non-paid pages, but I think generally they’d prefer to try and upsell you to a paid community page rather than damaging the relationship with a brand by simply deleting your page.

   On Flickr, this appears to hold true as well. Sponsored groups get special promotion, and can make use of the API as Bank of America, Purina, LG and Nikon have done, and get custom Flickr group templates as Nikon have. However brands like GM and Urban Outfitters are doing OK seemingly without any formal sponsorship in place.

2. Don’t forget the model releases
   Even if you stick to Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr that allow commercial usage, you still need model releases, as Virgin recently found out the hard way in Australia. Nikon got around this by putting the onus on the submitting photographer.

3. People assume the worst from brands when it comes to personal copyright
   One of the big challenges with user generated campaigns that involve original content is dealing with the copyright.

   Many brands simply deal with the risk of getting it wrong by applying a blanket agreement that any photos submitted can be used for whatever purpose, in perpetuity.

   These terms are typically written by lawsuit-shy lawyers rather than marketers intending to surreptitiously build a giant library of advertising fodder. However, people tend to assume the worst about companies, especially since these terms are generally buried in the small print.

   The net result is generally not good, and even solid photography brands like Nikon aren’t immune from the misconceptions and skepticism around this. And what can start as an attempt to do something good, like providing exposure to up-and-coming photographers, can end in misgivings all around.

   How do you get around this? If possible, people will respond better to terms that are specific as possible rather than a blanket agreement to use the photos forever for any purpose.

   Beyond that, the key is simply to put your terms up front and in bold rather than in the fine print. People get upset because it seems like the brand is trying to rip them off. If you say clearly and up front what rights people will assign over to the brand, the brand’s intentions come across better and people are free to consciously choose whether they are comfortable with exchanging those rights in order to participate in the activity.

4. Attempting to start a community space without a passionate user base in place or cred to start one.
   Urban Outfitters and MAKE have loyal and creative customers that are happy to express themselves alongside the band.

   Bank of America on the other hand is being ignored and treated with cynicism by the Flickr community for their attempt to tap into the community to get involved in their Olympics campaign. And given there’s been no activity in the group by the brand in the last three months, and only the lamest of attempts to get people involved, you can see where that might come from.

5. Competitions with prizes based solely on user voting are asking for trouble.
   You don’t have to read Portuguese to know that the people involved in the LG Viewtyful competition are less than impressed with the results of the competition. No one knows you’re a dog on the web, and no one knows you’re a bot with a zombie network voting for the same photo again and again. Or even just one guy with a proxy server and too much time on his hands.
6. Just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come.
   Brooks recently ran a series of competitions on Flickr that involved people tagging photographs of them wearing Brooks track jackets. The results? Well, let’s just say the most popular of the three had just 18 photos submitted from 8 different people, including a couple from Brooks themselves.

   The big problem? Not enough promotion. I’m guessing the only place you could find out about the competition was from the Brooks website, where you had to navigate through a few levels of sub-navigation. If you want people to participate, especially if there’s a barrier of entry involved, then you better make sure you are also doing the job of spreading the word.

Last thoughts

Given there are 44 million unique visitors to Flickr a month, Flickr has received a disproportionately low share of attention from brands compared to MySpace or Facebook.

There are a number of potential reasons for this. Firstly, Flickr is obviously focused on photography whereas Facebook and MySpace are essentially a free-for-all of personal expression and social interaction. The latter make much more sense for most brand activities.

Flickr is also probably more protective over its community than MySpace and Facebook. One of the big reasons for this is that Flickr generates revenue directly off its members through Pro subscriptions and affiliate deals, and so is not reliant on advertising and sponsorships the way that MySpace and Facebook are.

However, with Flickr being as big as it is, and with a passionate, creative and diverse user base like it has, it has great potential. The key is finding an opportunity that is both right for the brand, and provides something of value to the community.

Competitions are easy and obvious, but branded resource centers are virtually unexplored territory.

In any case, it’s best to understand and get to know the community a bit more before diving in. Have a look through the groups and streams, and read this article from George Oates and these community guidelines from Heather Champ and George Oates.

This turned into a much larger post than I originally intended, but hope it’s useful as a starting point. Did I miss anything or have any thoughts? Please let me know via email or in the comments, and I’ll try to keep this post up to date as an ongoing reference.

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